Landor's Tower, Or, Imaginary Conversations

Born in Wales, Iain Sinclair is an established and accomplished writer who has written several novels and many non-fiction titles, such as The Kodak Mantra Diaries, Dark-Lanthorns and Sorry Meniscus. His poetry accomplishments are equally impressive with at least nine titles to his credit. This novel begins with a comically violent argument between two secondhand book dealers, Billy Silverfish and Dryfeld, one of whom previously appeared in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Abruptly, the book dealers then become fabrications of another author, Andrew Norton, who like Sinclair originates from Wales. Norton returns to his home territory to gather data for a book that he is commissioned to write about the poet Walter Savage Landor, whose attempt to construct a senatorial estate around Llanthony Priory ended in catastrophe. But he is diverted from his project by Kaporal, an exhausted member of the press who thinks that he has made a connection between politican Jeremy Thorpe, who was tried and acquitted of conspiracy to murder in 1979, and a succession of suicides by workers in the secret defence industries in Wales. Is he right? Or are his regularly taped reports manufactured, invented merely to keep the pay cheque coming in? When Norton is accused of one of the murders that Kaporal is investigating, he is imprisoned in an asylum on the River Usk, where deeply buried childhood memories return. Sinclair's extraordinary, powerful prose is even more striking than the tale itself, which twists unpredictably between fact and fiction in this mixture of black comedy and intense rhetoric. A remarkable combination of history, fiction and inspiration. (Kirkus UK)